Collection Scope and Content Note

Correspondence; scrapbooks; journals; clippings; addresses;
translations; drafts, manuscripts, and articles; printed copies of works by or
about Goldwin Smith; obituaries and memorials; photographs; personal
correspondence and a few family papers; and materials gathered by Smith's
secretary Theodore Arnold Haultain for a series of volumes he planned to
publish on the works of Goldwin Smith.

Goldwin Smith's correspondence with members of the faculty and
administration of Cornell University not only reveals his concern for that
institution, but also relates to literary and political subjects. Included is
correspondence of George Lincoln Burr, Hiram Corson, George W. Curtis, Willard
Fiske, Jacob Gould Schurman, Moses Coit Tyler, and Andrew D. White. A series of
letters written between 1868 and 1870 to George Waring in England records
Smith's initial reactions to the new university and toward American places,
people, and attitudes. The University of Toronto and Queens University in
Kingston are the subjects of correspondence with J.W. Flavelle and George M.
Grant.

A.H. Beesly, A.V. Dicey, C.H. Firth, E.A. Freeman, George Otto
Trevelyan, and P. Villari are among the historians who corresponded with
Goldwin Smith; their letters comment upon current social and political trends
and events, as well as upon their work as historians. Among other
correspondents are Charles Francis Adams, the Duke of Argyll, Matthew Arnold,
W.J. Ashley, General Lord Bryce (NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW), Andrew Carnegie, Lord
Chief Justice Coleridge, D.C. Gilman, General Sir Fred Middleton, Julian
Pauncefote, Viscount Peel, and Carl Schurz.

There are also some family papers, including journals of Smith's
mother, Elizabeth Breton Smith.

Collection also includes Goldwin Smith's academic robe from Oxford and
hood from McMasters University.

English, Canadian, and American political issues (ca. 1880-1910)
dominate the correspondence of Goldwin Smith: the possibility of a
Canada-United States union, commercial or political; free trade vs. protection;
party maneuvering in all three countries; the problem of the French Canadian
element; the Irish Home Rule struggle; local and municipal government reform;
imperialism, particularly as it was manifested in the Boer and Spanish-American
Wars; the yellow press; the women's suffrage movement; the Jew in the modern
national state; socialism and the increasing importance of labor groups in
government; British policy toward Russia; the Canadian-Pacific Railroad and its
influence on government; and related topics.